Google’s new Boomerang app for iOS is a Novel idea But will it Work?
Google drops the Boomerang app for iPhone today and at first glance, this is a huge step forward for email!
When you think about it, email hasn’t really evolved much over the years. But the Boomerang app for Gmail is looking to change all of that.
I can remember the very first email address I had many years ago. It was a new and novel idea to me back in the late 90’s and I was somewhat familiar with email, but not all that familiar and I didn’t get to use an email application until I went off to my first year of college.
You see, back then the internet and email was a relatively new thing and not available to most people.
In college I had a university email, which was exciting, and I also had an email through an online social network called CollegeClub. I remember those days all too well!
When it came to using computers at home my dad had an old Versyss computer at our house running MacOS from what I can remember, and back then you had to boot the computer with a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. How times have changed!
Today, we have email apps that we can talk to and that’s also changed.
Enter Google’s Boomerang.
When it comes to email you have a lot of choices and I’m more than certain you haven’t given much thought to why and how you choose your email provider.
When I decided to purchase a domain some years ago for my website, I also created my email address at the same time. I bought deancantave.com because I knew at some point I would launch this blog. It only made sense to have my own domain, because well… that’s what most Internet Marketers, Entrepreneurs, and Bloggers do.
Always self-host.
But prior to that I used the more popular email platforms like Yahoo and Hotmail. But as email evolved and large tech companies established themselves with larger technical footholds, the features and benefits of email also changed.
A sidenote about ease of use, security, and speed—not to get too far off of the subject of Boomerang—but I need to mention this to you.
I migrated my primary domain email to Gmail earlier this year while at the same time re-building my blog for a few reasons:
1) Speed – Gmail web servers are superior when it comes to speed. I used another host for many years and while I was comfortable there, I realized that emails took too long to load and whenever I wanted to configure the app on my phone I was always forced to re-configure the mail server settings all over again.
2) Security – In a day and age when hacking is the new normal, I had to think of the importance of my data and how I wanted to manage it. If you’re anything like me you probably have a ton of apps, email addresses, personal info saved in apps, etc. I wrote a post here a few months ago regarding the use of password manager apps. I can’t begin to tell you how those apps are a GODSEND! I now have a central app where I can store all of my credentialed information in one place. These apps are EXTREMELY helpful for tracking, but for the purposes of security I separated my hosting for my blog from my email and my domain. The reason why you do this is because if someone happens to compromise, say, your domain account, they could potentially compromise everything else. OR, if your hosting company goes down and you’ve got your email and website hosted on the same platform that could be a problem as well. All in all, Gmail is a lot more secure and your emails are encrypted in transit between Gmails web servers.
3) Ease of use – I have several email accounts all within the app that I can access without a login in nanoseconds. I can configure the mail server settings once and be done. I can swipe in between my email accounts easily, and now with Boomerang I can schedule emails, pause my emails, and even talk to the app and tell it to find certain emails using the new AI (Artificial Intelligence) feature. This feature isn’t the best in my opinion, but in some instances it’s valuable.
Boomerang App
The Boomerang app has been around for Android for a while and today it was just released for iOS.
I downloaded it and I now have Boomerang and Gmail on my phone, but I’m trying to understand whether or not I need both. Everytime I receive a new email it shows up on my phone twice, but suffice it to say I’m certain I can delete the Gmail app and use the Boomerang for my primary email.
The Boomerang app does a ton of things from allowing you to schedule email, pause email, and you even have a feature where you can place your finger on an email and swipe to the left to move, mark, star, or delete the email with the flick of your finger.
The app also has a new built-in AI voice assistant—Artificial Intelligence in case you weren’t aware— and the app also gives you some additional features and tools that Gmail haven’t offered just yet.
I specifically like the ability to pause my email notifications, especially given the fact that i’m signed up to over 1 million email lists–not really 1 million but it feels like it–from Bloggers and Entrepreneurs that I follow. I can also send emails back to myself to remind me to respond, which comes in very handy when you have over 1 million emails like I do. I’m being sarcastic, but you get my point.
The AI assistant can actually hear you over moderate background noise, pause your emails on command, and find emails you need to respond if you have a very large Inbox. It can also draft an email for meetings that you need to reschedule. The downside?? Boomerang’s AI assistant is rudimentary at best, and it’s only trained for very specific commands; one or two wrong words and you’ll get an “unknown command” error.
While it’s taken Boomerang over four years to release the iOS app after launching on Android, it’s still a great improvement as compared to other email platforms. The AI functionality will be available on iOS but not on Android, at least not at the moment.
Read my previous blog post below.